Cloud Computing for Web Startups

20Aug08

Years ago, online storage, CPU time and bandwidth are usually the top three things that stop would-be web entrepreneurs from launching their online projects. Not unless they have enough capital to fund these expensive requirements. As years went by, hardware got cheaper and so did the cost of bandwidth. Now, big and new companies setup free services that let you offload some of the bandwidth and computing power your website needs to them. I think they call this cloud computing – using the internet as your infrastructure and as your OS.

While setting up ComputersMuna.com, making full use of these “cloud” services were at the top of our list. We didn’t have startup money, and it is just a hobby project.

So far, our only expense is web hosting. We’re currently being hosted on a Linode 720 account running Ubuntu. We don’t have a lot of resources allocated for the site, but until our traffic picks up, this package is more than enough. How will this setup be enough? We decided to offload the following services:

• Incoming Email – for this, we went ahead and signed up for Google’s hosted email services. The service is free and it gives you more than enough space for your email. Not to mention the reliability of the infrastructure and spam filtering.
• DNS Service – for this, we decided not to run our own DNS server and use our host’s instead. More CPU time for us.
• RSS Feed Hosting – we find Feedburner to be the most reliable provider for this.
• Site Statistics & Analytics – we think having Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and W3Counter gives us more data than what we need.
• Blog Hosting – this article you’re currently reading is being hosted by WordPress.com

With development still ongoing, another requirement that we want to offload is image hosting, which ImageShack provides for free through their Developer API. The API they have is great because other than hosting, they can also do image resizing for you. So you don’t just save bandwidth, but computing power as well.

Other than image hosting, another ideal candidate for offloading is site search. This can be done successfully through search giants Google and Yahoo!. Updates may not be as real-time as when you do your locally, but it works, and definitely scales well.

Other services that are of interest to us are SVN Hosting provided by Beanstalk, friendly project collaboration by Basecamp, and the nifty gadgets provided by Netvibes.

Calling on these choices places the site’s operations on a lot of external dependencies. But looking at the track record of each of those service providers, we think that we’re pretty much in good hands. A lot of savings, and a lot of reliability.

If there’s a good time to setup and get started with an online business, that time’s definitely now.

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Tags: bandwidth, cloud computing, hosted services, start up, web2.0